How Dashboards Play An Important Role In Business Intelligence

By Author: Bappaditta Jana
Total Articles: 87
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Dashboards are data visualization solutions that are often present in a business intelligence tool. For years, the importance of these has been underlined. However, they have a vital role to play in business intelligence. Also known as enterprise dashboards, these are of various types. Some of these types are operational dashboards, strategic dashboards, analytical, and tactical dashboards. In recent years, such dashboards are used by several different industries, such as healthcare, marketing, sales, manufacturing, and more. It does not matter whether a business is small or large, everyone wants to harness the available data and to make the most of it in which dashboards appear indispensable. Now, let’s have a look at how these dashboards are important.

Offer engaging data visualization

You may have come across the term data visualization umpteen times. It means the graphical representation of data that helps ordinary employees and key business decision-makers to understand the business data in an easy way. In the past, data collected and analyzed by business intelligence tools are understood only by the people ...
... of the concerned department. For example, if the business report is on sales data, only the people of the sales department can many out any meaning out of the data within the report.

Dashboards in BI tools eliminate this persistent problem by offering engaging data visualization. It enables even the non-technical person or those who are not in the concerned department to comprehend the information within the report in a visually appealing manner. It represents data in form of charts, graphs, and gauges that not only capture the attention of the intended person but also helps to get valuable data insights within no time. Some of the popular charts by which data is represented visually by dashboards are funnel charts, pie charts, bar charts, line charts, donut charts, and so on.

Facilitates easy performance monitoring

Performance monitoring is a necessity in every business. However, doing the same regularly is not easy without having the right tools. Although tools driven by business intelligence do the data analysis and present the same, it remains a tough task to monitor the key performance indicators. However, dashboards facilitate easy performance monitoring as they mostly have a customizable interface.

These dashboards make it possible for the intended user to view the performance of employees, departments, or even their products within a given time frame, such as a month, quarter, or year. For example, if a key decision-maker within a business wants to monitor the sales performance of a key item within the last month and that too within a specific city, region, or country, he or she needs to just make use of custom filters and drag and drop functionality.

Thus, dashboards play an integral role in business intelligence. It is important to understand that now it is the data that powers every business, and one who can understand this data will have an edge above others. Dashboards help in understanding this complex data and in the identification of hidden data patterns.

Bappaditta Jana is a blogger who loves to spend his free time engaging in sports or gardening. Based in Kolkata, he is currently working with EasyReports an IT firm that has developed a BI reporting tool that can easily integrate with Tally ERP and many other applications.